The 1000 most-visited sites on the web | Hacker News Reader

The 1000 most-visited sites on the web

google.com

15 pointsrayvega23 comments

If this is the same list that showed up a few months ago, I had extracted some header information from all of the sites and placed it in a usable format for some analysis:

http://openmymind.net/top1000data.txt

I used your file back then to graph the web servers these sites run: http://lazyant.com/post/642248858/web-servers-of-the-most-vi...

I'm surprised that Yahoo is doing as well as they are.

It's easy to attribute the high scores of Live.com, Bing, and MSN to the power of web browser default settings, but Yahoo doesn't make a web browser so people have to consciously choose to go there.

http://www.chandlernguyen.com/2009/08/search-engine-market-s...

Indeed, Yahoo still have a few holdouts around the world.

I'm surprised by some entries in the list:

Adobe 13, Slideshare 192, Macromedia(!) 199.

And where's Reddit?

Also:

microsoft.com: Software apple.com: Mac OS

Oh really?

For both Adobe and Macromedia the requirements for updating software can be used to explain a large portion of their traffic, 96% (I think that was the figure) of web browsers have Flash, the majority don't come with it installed and sometimes require updates, so it's not that out there to suggest maybe 90% of the internet visit their sites at least once... macromedia from out of date "update @ macromedia.com..." links maybe?

As an un-related side note, two of the sites I started have higher traffic (uniques and page views) that some of these sites (when the sites traffic is combined, as they cater to the same audience, I count them as a single site in stats anyway :p) -- awesome :-)

Ah, of course. Silly me - thanks for bothering to enlighten me!

And where's Reddit?

Too small (not enough user): Reddit: https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteD...

kukinews.com (site number 1000): https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile#siteD...

And the answer to the inevitable "but reddit has Unique visitors (cookies)'s" is here: http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/answer.py?answer...

"Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites."

This list may be less interesting / useful than you might think. It is tailored toward (non-adult) advertisers, and will be most relevant to them.

It's also wildly inaccurate, about 2 months ago Joel (I think? I always forget his name...) said that Stackoverflow does ~>60,000,000 page views per month, this claims 40,000,000 for Stackoverflow. I guess nobody should expect it to be accurate anyway, but this is an example of it. It also doesn't include a site I know of that doesn't a lot more than Stackoverflow...

If you know much about web stats (and comparing them from different providers) you'd realize that a 30% discrepancy is actually pretty accurate (sad but true!).

There are lots of reasons for this, not least the definition of a "Page View". Most publishers count a page view as anytime a page is served (because they are concerned about keeping the site alive, and load on it), whereas advertisers count it as everytime a page is seen by a human. Notably, this means advertisers exclude search engine bots from their page view counts, while publishers count them. (Although obviously this depends on the publisher and the context they are talking)

So in other words... it may not actually be a list of the most visited sites. Awesome! Garbage data.

It's like seeing a list of the so-called top selling books, and then learning they exclude the Bible, romance novels, westerns, etc. Too funny.

Very interesting how Google.com isn't on that list...

The about page says:

"Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites."

Done by Google, are they still #1 above Facebook?

According to Alexa, yes. However about 1/3 more sites link to Facebook.

i guess nobody knows what myspace is for anymore.

So, even Google may be excluded from that list, what is their position? Do they win FB?

Quantcast has a similar list too: http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

Seems like many of the top pages are just what browsers default to when they start up.

Anyone can explain Yahoo in #3? Is it because of their search engine? Yahoo Mail?

Yahoo still has a few monster properties with metrics that competitors would kill to have: Mail, Sports, News, and Finance are the biggest ones.

This data is 18 months old but is still directionally correct. http://gigaom.com/2009/07/16/yahoos-number-ones-so-much-more...

Who the fuck goes to adobe.com?

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